Once an Eagle

  “Maybe,” Sam Damon answered. He was sitting near her on the lawn, his big hands locked around his knees. “Only sometimes you get involved in something whether you want to or not.”

  “Oh, you’re so sure of yourself.” He made no reply to this, which irritated her still more. She was a tall, slender girl with blond hair and deep blue eyes that looked at everything with piercing candor, and she stared at him for a moment, hard, then tossed her head. “You don’t know everything.”

  “Don’t I?” he said, and grinned.

  From down the street near Clausen’s Forge there came a loud popping noise that swelled into a high, sustained roar, and in a few seconds a Packard touring car came by, majestic and maroon, churning up dust in clouds. Its driver, a slim young man in a white duster and maroon cloth cap, lifted one hand from the shiny wooden wheel and waved, calling out something to them, inaudible in the engine’s clamor. The car swerved suddenly and the driver clutched the wheel again with both hands. Celia waved back. Fritz Clausen’s dog, a bigheaded, shaggy animal, raced after it, yapping frantically, its tail thrashing round and round, and behind the dog came two children brandishing sticks and hooting in the golden dust.

  “Look at him,” Sam said. “Scared to death it’ll run away with him.”

  “Well I never—! You can’t even drive an automobile,” she retorted.

  “You want to bet?”

  She stared at him. “Where would you have learned?”

  “The truck. Down at the switchyard.”

  “Oh—a truck … I’m going to have one of my own when I’m twenty-one. An Olds Runabout. Have you seen them? There was a colored picture in The Saturday Evening Post. With yellow fenders and green leather upholstery. It’s just the pezazz. Don’t you want to own one, Sam?”

  He turned and looked at her for a moment. He was tall and solidly muscled, with a rather long, angular face and steady gray eyes that could unsettle her completely. She had watched him play football and baseball and had gone to three dances with him, one formal. She’d had a crush on him ever since she’d been thirteen, and his brooding silences drove her wild.

  “—Well, don’t be so inscrutable!” she burst out. “Of course you want one …”

  “Sure,” he said simply. “Someday.”

  “Well, there’s no earthly reason why you shouldn’t.” She looked around her, exasperated. From the massive old tree beside them a green apple fell with a thick, solid sound.

  “July drop,” Sam murmured.

  “July drop,” she mimicked. “It’s still June.” She spurned the apple with her foot. “Father says you could have a tremendous future ahead of you—he says you’ve got a lot of the necessary qualities: mental aptitude and self-discipline…” She paused, watching Sam, who seemed to be studying the trunk of the apple tree where the sapsuckers had stitched it with rows of neat round black holes. “He says you’re too impulsive, too dreamy, your head in the clouds. He says”—and she leaned forward so that her face was close to his—“you’re wasting the most important years of your life, Sam. Farm jobs and playing baseball, and that ridiculous night-clerk job at the hotel … Why on earth did you take it? Look at the rings under your eyes.”

  “It pays twelve-fifty a week, that’s why,” he answered shortly.

  “You could be making a lot more than that, if you weren’t so stubborn …”

  There was a burst of laughter from the screen porch, and a lively voice with a trace of brogue cried, “No no no—they’ll break through this summer and come goose-stepping down the Paris boulee-vards with the bands blaring and the glockenspiels twirling their wolf tails in a fine frenzy, just the way they did last time. They’re professionals, Mr. Verney—they know soldiering from muzzle to butt plate, and that’s where you want to put your money. I saw them in Peking. They never make a mistake.”

  “Somebody made a mistake at the Marne,” old George Verney retorted in his hoarse, muffled monotone.

  “A temporary setback, nothing more.”

  “If you call nearly two years—”

  “You wait. They’ll let the murdering sods of British bleed themselves white this season and then it’ll be ‘Hoch der Kaiser and on to Paris!’You mark my words …”

  “Peg told me your Uncle Bill’s come back to stay this time,” Celia said. “Has he really?”

  “I don’t know. He never has before.”

  She frowned, scratching at the worn wood of the bench with her nails. The Damons were poor: that was half the trouble. The Damons were poor and the Harrodsens were well off. Her father was president of the Platte and Midland Bank, and a past president of the Grange. They had the biggest house in town, and she and her sister were the best-dressed girls; her mother was head of the Eastern Star and ran the charity bazaar at the county fair every September. The Damons on the other hand were a hard-luck family. Sam’s father had started the hardware store that the Harlan brothers owned now, and had failed because of a panic; and then he’d been hurt in a harvesting accident and had to have his right leg amputated at the thigh, and had died five months later. Celia remembered him: a quiet, genial, unassuming man who would give her an all-day sucker from a crumpled paper bag in his shirt pocket and pass his hard hand gently over her hair … For six years now Sam and his mother had been supporting the family, with sporadic help from Sam’s Uncle Bill Hanlon, who was what her father called a drifter, a man with no sand.

  Aloud she said: “Father says he drinks. Your Uncle Bill.”

  Sam shrugged. “He has a few now and then, I guess. He’s Irish, you know.”

  “So is your mother—she’s his sister, for heaven’s sake!”

  “Well. She’s a woman.” He grinned at her. “There’s nothing wrong with a man taking a drink once in a while. Uncle Bill was a sergeant in the Army.”

  “What difference does that make? Honestly, sometimes you don’t make any sense at all …” A green apple struck the bench close beside her and she jumped, and then said suddenly: “Oh Sam, why don’t you take it?”

  “Take what?”

  “The job at the bank, the bank! Haven’t you even been listening?”

  He stuck a blade of grass between his teeth. “Oh, that.”

  “Yes, that! Goodness! Half the boys in town would give their eye-teeth for a chance like that. And you—you act as if you don’t even care …”

  He kept gazing off at the willows at the end of the long field behind the house. “It’s all right for some people,” he said. “But not for me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’ve got something else on my mind.”

  “Well, you needn’t give yourself such airs,” she said crossly. “It’s certainly better than going around playing baseball and being a night clerk…” She put her feet together and leaned back, watching him covertly out of the tail of her eye. “Who are you to be so toplofty? Just because you’ve got this silly idea about your destiny—”

  His head snapped around at this and she couldn’t help grinning: she knew she’d reached him. When he was aroused his eyes became darker and deeper until they were like slate; his face was very solemn. I wouldn’t like to have him mad at me, she thought with a little shiver. Then to her surprise she giggled between her teeth.

  “Where’d you get that idea?” he was saying in a very flat voice.

  “Never mind.” But she couldn’t resist it and said: “You don’t think girls have secrets between them, do you? Secrets are only between girls and boys.”

  “Peg,” he said with finality.

  “She says you’ve got all kinds of soupy ideas about saving your country in a moment of great peril. Like George Washington. Is that true?” He stared back at her a few seconds, his face very long and determined in the gathering twilight, and for an instant she thought, Maybe he could: maybe he could really do something just like that. Filled with a horde of conflicting thoughts, she cried: “Well, is it?”

  He looked down then and blew on the blade of grass, which emitted a hig
h, reedy squawk. “Something like that,” he said.

  “But that’s crazy! Here you are”—she swung an arm airily—“in this little long-lost town a million miles from nowhere at all. You’ve never been east—you’ve never even been to Omaha …”

  “I’ll get there.”

  “Well, I can’t for the life of me see how.” He was studying the grass between his knees and she decided to be artful. “Sam …”

  “Yes?”

  “What would you do? with your life? If you had your choice—anything at all—and all you had to do was snap your fingers. What would you choose?”

  “That’d be telling.” He blew on the grass blade again, and his eyes rolled up at her. “But I’ll tell you one thing: you’ll hear about it when I do it.”

  “Don’t be a tease … I won’t tell a soul, Sam.”

  “Like Peg.”

  “Not like Peg. I promise.”

  He was silent for a moment, chewing on the grass stem. Then he looked up and said: “All right. I’m going to go to West Point.”

  Her head went back. “West Point! The Army?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But why—?”

  “Well, for one thing there’s no tuition. They pay your way through.”

  “… But you can’t just go there,” she cried, exasperated at him all over again. “You have to be appointed or something.”

  “Then I’ll get myself appointed.”

  “Well, I don’t see how. And the exams—you’ll never pass the exams …”

  “I’m not so sure of that.”

  She gave a hoot of incredulity and stamped her foot. “That’s the most fantastic thing I’ve ever heard of. Nobody with any ambition, any—any gumption, goes into the Army … It’ll be years and years—barracks and fiendishly strict rules, and marching—Harriet Ebersen knew a boy from Council Bluffs who went there for a year—and then you’ll get sent away to Slambangtokanga or some place, mangrove swamps full of snakes and alligators. And there you’ll sit and sit, and wish you were never born … What on earth for, Sam?”

  “Look, you asked me and I told you,” he said with a trace of impatience. “There it is.”

  She flounced back on the bench. It infuriated her that he’d nursed this idea for so long and she’d never known about it. He will, she thought crossly; that’s just what he’ll do—he’s just silly enough and stubborn enough. She was in love with him, she was sure she was in love with him—and he wasn’t even listening to her half the time; his head was all awhirl with ideas like this!

  “All because of your loony destiny,” she mourned. Then her chin came up. “I won’t wait for you, you know.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  She shot a glance at him, her eyes wide with astonishment—saw he was grinning at her. “Oh, you! You think I’m joking, you’ll find out I’m not. You can go off to—Manila, for all I care …” She proclaimed: “Fred Shurtleff is an outstanding young man!”

  “He certainly is outstanding.”

  “You can make fun of him all you want. He owns a Packard automobile.”

  “His father gave it to him.”

  “He’s going to be mayor of this town someday, governor of the state of Nebraska.”

  “Politics,” Sam said scornfully.

  “What’s so dreadful about politics?”

  “You spend half your life telling people things you don’t believe yourself.”

  “Oh—you’re impossible!… Why won’t you face up to things?”

  “No fun in that.”

  “You’re unregenerate!—” With a sudden swift movement she flicked a hand at his head—and even more quickly he ducked away and caught her by the ankles. She let out a squeal and clung to the bench with all her might.

  “Don’t you pull me off, Sam Damon, I’ll get my skirts all over grass stains—don’t!”

  “You’re no fun anymore.” With a show of disgust he released her. “Remember the picnic at Hart’s Island? when we were playing Desperadoes and Ollie Banning’s prize bull got loose and Shellie Kimball tried to lasso it with a clothesline?”

  “Uh-huh.” She smoothed her skirts and passed a hand beneath her hair. “We’re too old to play like that now,” she declared. “Now we ought to think of the future.”

  “That’s right. But the future hangs on the past.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Yes, it does. That’s the only way you learn to deal with the future.”

  “Maybe.” He was always saying things like that, out of the blue; it was one of the reasons Miss Cincepaugh said at graduation that Sam was the brightest boy she’d ever taught …

  “—six feet deep!” Uncle Bill Hanlon was saying, his voice near hilarity. “Yes! Spang in the middle of your back yard and fill it with water, and stand in it for three days and nights on an empty belly. Then hire a raving maniac to skulk around in the shrubbery taking potshots at you with a revolver whenever it happens to strike his happy fancy. Sure! That way you’ll save yourself the trouble of going across the water and engulfing yourself in the doithering Donnybrook at all …”

  The bell in the steeple of the Congregational Church on Main Street began to strike with measured care, and Celia jumped to her feet. “Oh! Eight. I’ve got to go home. I promised Mother I’d help her sort for the rummage. Walk me home, Sam. It’s still early.”

  “All right.”

  Holding hands, they crossed the lawn and went out through the wooden gate and along Merivale Street; the elms made a still, lush canopy in the twilight. Lamps were coming on at kitchen windows, on porches, shining inside their frosted globes like tender yellow blooms of light. The town—its name was Walt Whitman and it had been incorporated only a bare sixteen years before—lay on the great south bend of the Platte River between Kearney and Lexington. Good farming country, the land ran back into gentle hills to the north or petered out in the cottonwoods along the river, where the Union Pacific switchyards were. A farm wagon went by, its two occupants sitting on the buckboard, swaying with the easy rocking motion of the axles. The driver, a heavy, red-faced man with a big nose, nodded to Sam, who murmured, “Good evening”; and the wagon creaked evenly away into the deepening dusk.

  “Who’s that?” Celia asked him.

  “Cyrus Timrud. I’ve helped him with the harvest for years.”

  That made her think of Isobelle Timrud and she clucked in irritation. Miserable little red-haired tomboy hussy. At her own Halloween party the year before, Sam had spent so much time ducking for apples with Isobelle the front of his hair had got soaked and stuck up like a rooster’s comb; and when they played that game of eating the licorice she could swear he’d deliberately held back so he and Isobelle got to the knot at the same moment. Well, that was silly, everybody did that a little; but the point was, Sam should only have done it with her …

  At her front gate they stopped, and she turned toward him. “Do you want to come in?” She watched him run his eyes over the huge white structure with its two slender columns flanking the front door, the high hip roof of slate, the greenhouse on the southeast corner. It was the only house with a slate roof and a greenhouse for miles around.

  “I guess not,” he said. “There are a couple of things I’ve got to do.”

  She swung his big hand back and forth, her fingers interlocked in his, wishing it weren’t quite so dark out—twenty minutes ago she would have looked more alluring, and she would have been able to read his expression better. She raised her eyes to his. “You think about it, Sam. I meant what I said. About not waiting. If you go cartwheeling off to some palm-tree island somewhere …”

  “Of course you meant it.”

  “Stop laughing!” she said, peering up at him.

  “I’m not laughing.”

  “Yes, you are. Honestly, you’re incorrigible.”

  “I tell you I wasn’t, Cele.” But his voice still seemed to her near laughter.

  In her most imperious tone she declared, “I fail to se
e where humor is involved … Don’t you want to—become somebody, be somebody?”

  “—You bet I do,” he answered, and now his voice was as serious as it could be. “You just watch my dust.”

  He stood staring down at her. Big and lithe, capable of standing the world on its beam ends and giving it an extra spin if he chose, he looked immeasurably romantic and wild in the near dark. He’s so handsome and intelligent and he won’t do what I want, she inwardly wailed. He’s so stubborn!

  “… Oh, Celia,” he murmured all at once, “don’t you see—life is so many things, it can roll out in so many ways from what you expect, what you plan on …” He threw out one hand, a rare gesture for him. “My God—there’s all of life, over there somewhere—” He stopped, said: “That isn’t what I mean.”

  “Destiny,” she answered slyly, drawling out the word. But this time he didn’t laugh or reach out to grab her. A train down at the switchyards started up—a series of swift, chuffing bursts, stopped abruptly; and a child shrilly called to end a game of hide-and-seek. “All-ee—all-ee—in freeeeeee …” She sighed; she found herself gazing up at Sam, half-mesmerized. All at once he seemed part of the town, the very measure of it—slumbering, wide-flung land of cornfields and prairie, reaching west under a bold, starry sky, rooted and restless both; the sense of certainty, of unalterable promise hovered around him like heat in forged iron … He will be great and grand, she thought, rapt in the very contemplation of it; he will do something fine and noble and earth-shaking, and I will be standing there behind him while they all cheer.

  “Mr. Destiny,” she said, but softly this time, almost entreatingly, and raised her cheek to his. His lips brushed it solemnly, as though he were almost afraid to touch her. And then to her own great surprise—for she had never done anything like this before—she reached up and locked her arms around his neck and gave herself to him in a passionate kiss. But instead of captivating him as she had intended, she herself was swept with a delicious, singing tension that tightened and released and tightened again in fiery golden bands; she felt as if she were falling backward through a hundred miles of capering, streaming stars. She was slipping away, melting like wax in fire …